Cargill Grain Elevator

It was January 2013 and I was taking a week off in between jobs. I decided to take a solo road trip with no real plan…which is pretty unusual for me. My career was going well and I was a lot more worried about getting caught exploring than I had been previously. There were, however, one or two places I really wanted to see as my exploring career started to wind down so I planned my road trip to be able to visit a few.

I hadn’t been to Baltimore in many years and was considering stopping there for a night. As I drove into the city, there was a massive black grain elevator poking up into the sky and I said to myself, “I need to see the inside of that thing”. So I stopped. Finding a really excellent hotel that gave me a deal on a suite, I wound up using it as my base of operations for the entire trip.

The Cargill Grain Elevator was constructed in 1918 by the Pennsylvania Central Railroad (see here for the source of most of my information). It had a storage capacity of 4 million Bushells and was the second to last grain elevator in Baltimore, a city with a booming history in the grain trade, when it closed in 1994. Grain was brought in via railroad cars and loaded on to ships for export. It was purchased by Central Soya Company in 1970 which later became the Mississippi River Grain Company. It was eventually purchased by ConAgra Inc. before it shut down.

This was one of those industrial locations where the light is just perfect inside. I had an absolute blast shooting this place despite the bitter, bitter cold.